Kidnapping in the Pacific; Or, The Adventures of Boas Ringdon / A long four-part Yarn

by William Henry Giles Kingston

“At last we reached one of the many islands of the Fiji group. I had never been there before; but I had heard that the people were terrible cannibals. So they were till the missionaries persuaded the king and his chiefs, and most of his subjects, to give up the practice. A considerable number of white men have of late years settled on several of the islands, and have bought land to grow coffee and other things. They find a difficulty in getting the natives of Fiji to work for them, so they have to obtain labourers from other islands, and this was the work our schooner was engaged in. Our cargo was quickly distributed among the planters, some taking ten, some twenty, or as many as they could get.

“The natives of Fiji are black and fine big fellows. They wear their hair frizzled out, and big turbans on the top of all; some of them, indeed, wear great wigs over their own hair, for the larger a man’s head is, the more important he thinks himself. This makes them look very tall; indeed, many of the chiefs are very fine men. They also wear ornaments of all sorts, necklaces, and rings, and beads round their legs and arms, and they stick into their ears huge ornaments, while large brooches hang down over their breasts. The common people, however, wear very little clothing at all, and many of the chiefs who have turned Christians, dress something after the English fashion, as they fancy; or at all events, cover their bodies with robes of their native cloth.

“I found a number of English and Frenchmen, and people of all countries settled on the islands, and there are a good lot of grog shops, so that they may be said to have made some progress in imitating civilised people. In some of the wilder parts of the country, however, the natives are still cannibals, and do not scruple to kill and eat any strangers they can catch. Not long ago they were addicted to that unpleasant custom, so that any strangers wrecked on their coasts were sure to be eaten. When they could not get strangers they ate each other; sometimes a dozen, and sometimes even twenty slaves, were killed for one great feast. Altogether from what I heard of the people, I had no fancy to stop and live among them.

“I must say this much for the missionaries, that they have cured them of their worst habit. At some of the villages I visited, where the missionaries have been long established, the people were as quiet and decent, and well-behaved as any I have been amongst; too much, as I must own, to my taste.

“They are capital swimmers, and seem as much at home in the water as on land. The women swim as well as the men. At one village I stopped at, where, though they had given up eating human flesh, they did not pretend to be Christians, I saw a curious sort of game played by the girls. A stout post was stuck in the water some way from the shore. On the top of it was laid the trunk of a large cocoa-nut tree, the base resting near the shore, and the tip projecting beyond the post over deep water. The fun was for the girls to run up the inclined tree at full speed, and then to leap off from the point and swim back to shore one after the other, as fast as they could go. Twenty or thirty girls could play at the game together, and such shouting, and shrieking, and laughing I never heard.

“However, as the vessel I had come in, the ‘Thisby,’ was returning to Australia, I went in her.

“We got a few natives from the Kingsmill Islands, the New Hebrides, and other places, and carried them to Brisbane.

“Our skipper having landed them in good condition without difficulty, got another licence to bring back a further cargo of fifty natives—for the Government officer didn’t think the vessel had room enough to carry more. Our captain and supercargo, however, had a different notion on the subject.

“We managed to pick them up much as we had done others. Of course it was the same to the natives whether they went to Queensland or Fiji. Instead of fifty, by the clever management of our supercargo and interpreter, we got altogether a hundred. The captain said it would never do to return with so many to Brisbane, and hearing that there was still a great demand for labour at the Fijis, we shaped a course for those islands. The accommodation for our passengers was not altogether such as civilised people would have liked. We had run up a number of shelves round the hold on which they stowed themselves at night. They were all stark naked, and they had no mats to lie on, but we could not of course expect these savages to be over particular.